The Stark County Democrat. [volume] (Canton, Ohio) 1833-1912, 1887-05-12

of human life. Life is neither tragedy
nor farce. Men are not all either knaves
or heroes. Women are neither angels nor
iuries. And yet, if yol depended upon
much of the literature of the lay You would
get the idea that life, instead of being
something earnest, something practical, is
a fitful and fantastic and extravagant thing.
How poorly prepared IRE that young man
and woman for the duties Of to-day who
spent last night wading through brilliant
4, passages descriptive of magnificent knaVery
and wickedness! The man will be looking
all day long for his heroine in the tin shop,
by the forge, in the factory, in the count
ing-room, and he will not find her, and he
will be dissatisfied. A man who gives him
self up to the indiscriminate reading of
novels will be nerveless, inane, and a
nuisance. He will be fit neither for the
store, nor the shop, nor the field. A wo-
man who gives herself up to the indiscrim-
! mate reading of novels will be untitled for
the duties of wife, mother, sister, daughter.
| There she is, hair dishevelled, countenance
vacant, cheeks pale, hands trembling,
/ bursting into tears at midnight over the
! fate of some unfortunate lover; in the day
| time, when she ought to be busy, staring
! by the half hour at nothing, biting her
finger nails into the quick. The carpet,
! that was plain before, will be palmer after
/ having wandered through romance all
/ night long in tesselated halls of castles.
| And your industrious companion will be
| more unattractive than ever now that you
/ have walked in the romance through parks
| with plumed princesses, or lounged in
! the arbor with the polished desperate. Oh,
| these confirmed novel readers! They are
1 untitled for this life, which is tremendous
| discipline. They know not how to go
through the furnaces of trial through which
, they must pass, and they are untitled for a
world where everything we gain we achieve
| by hard, long continuing, and exhaustive
work.
Again: Abstain from all those books
which, while they have some good things
about them, have also an admixture of
evil. You have read books that had two
elements in them-the good and the bad.
Which stuck to you? The bad The heart
: of most people is like a sieve, which lets
the small particles of gold fall through,
but keeps the great cinders. Once in q
while there is mind like loadstone,
which, plunged amid steel and brass fill
ings, gathers up the steel and repels the
brass. But it is generally just the oppo-
site. If you attempt to plunge through a
hedge of burrs to get one blackberry, you
will get more burrs than blackberries.
You cannot afford to read bad book,
however good you are. You say: "The
influence is insignificant" l tell you that
the scratch Of pin has sometimes pro-
duced the lockiaw. Alas, if through curl
osity, as many do, you pry into an evil
book, your curiosity is as dangerous as that
of the man who would take torch into a
gunpoWder mill merely to see whether it
would really blow up or not. In q
menagene IN New York a man put his arm
through the bars of black leopard's cage.
The animals hide looked SO sleek, and
bright, and beautiful. He just stroked ii
once. The monster seized him, and he
drew forth hand torn, and mangled, and
bleeding. Oh, touch not evil, even with
the faintest stroke Though it may be
glossy and beautiful, touch it not, lest you
pull forth your soul torn and bleeding
under the clutch of the black leopard.
"But," you say, show can l find out
whether book is good or bad without
reading it?" There is always something
suspicious about a bad book. / never knew
an xception-something suspicious in the
index or style of illustration. This venom
Gus reptile almost always carries warning
rattle.
Again: / charge you to stand off from
all those books which corrupt the imagina-
ton and infame the passions. l do moi
refer now to that kind of book which the
villain has under his coat waiting for the
school TO get out and then, looking both
ways to see that there is no policeman
around the block, offers the book TO youl
son on his way home. 1 do not speak Of
that kind of literature, but that which
evades the law and comes out in polished
style, and with acute plot sounds the toe
sin that rouses up all the baser passions OF
the soul. To-day, under the nostrils o.
this land, there is fetid, reeking, un-
washed literature enough to poison all the
fountains of public virtue and smite youl
sons and daughters as with the wing of g
destroying angel, and it is time that the
ministers of the Gospel blew the trumpet
and rallied the forces of righteousness, al
armed to the teeth, in this great battle
against depraved literature.
Again, abstain from those books which
are apologetic of crime. 1t is a sad thing
that some of the best and most beautiful
book bindery, and some of the fnest
rhetoric, have been brought to make sin at
tractive. Vice is horrible thing, anyhow
1t is born Ill shame and it dies bowling in
the darkness. In this world it is scourged
with whip of scorpions, but afterward the
thunders of Gods wrath pursue it across 0
boundless desert, beating it with ruin and
woe. When you come to paint carnalitv,
do not paint it as looking from behind en-
broidered curtains or through lattice o1
royal seraglio, but as writhing in the
agonies of city hospital
Cursed be the books that try to make i'm
purity decent and crime attractive and
hypocrisy noble. Cursed be the books
that swarm with libertines and despera-
does, who make the brain of the young
people whirl with villainy. Ye authors who
write them, ye publishers who print them,
We booksellers who distribute them shall
be cut to pieces, if not by an aroused COM
munity, then at last by the hail of Divine
vengeance, which shall sweep to the Lowest
pit Of perdition all We murderers of souls
tell you, though you may escape in this
world, you will be ground at last under the
hoof of eternal calamities, and you will be
chained to the rock, and you will have the
vultures of despair clawing at your soul
and those whom you have destroyed viii
come around to torment you, and to poul
hotter Goals of fury upon your head, anG
rejoice eternally in the outcry of your pair
and the howl of your damnation. "Got
shall wound the hairy scalp of him tina
goeth on in his trespasses,
The clock strikes midnight. A. fail
form bends over a romance. The eyet
fash fire. The breath is quick and irregu,
lar. Occasionally the color flashes to the
cheek, and then dies out. The hands
tremble as though guardian spirit were
irving to shake the deadly book out of the
grasp. Hot tears fall. She laughs with {
shrill voice that drops dead at its owr
sound. The sweat on her brow is the spray
dashed up from the river Of death. The
clock strikes -four" and the rosy dawr
soon after begins to look through the lat
tice upon the pale form that looks like {
detained specter of the night. Soon in {